poetry exam spring 97

Typical In-Class Poetry Assignment

ENG 102, Prof. Connell

Usually Given on the Last Day of Class

The essay you are about to write has two purposes:

1. It primarily measures your ability to write an extemporaneous, reasonably error-free essay that meets exit criteria for the course. I want to insure that everyone who successfully completes the other requirements for EN 152 can also meet the literacy level generally expected of freshman college students, as established by the Board of Regents. You cannot pass this course without meeting this requirement. Serious errors that can prevent you from passing this exam are: excessive sentence fragments, sentence fusion, agreement mistakes, faulty parallels, faulty punctuation and capitalization, comma splices, tense shifts, incoherence, misused apostrophes, mangled sentence structure, adverb/adjective misuse. Outrageous and frequent spelling mistakes may also disqualify you. In addition, I expect to see evidence of cohesive paragraph development--mostly five-sentence paragraphs or longer--through effective use of topic sentences that relate to a thesis.

2. It functions as your third, graded evaluation.

Directions: please write a one or two-page narrative (seven paragraphs, maximum) on one of the following questions. Although this is a personal narrative, it is always a good idea to use selected quotes (where applicable) to illustrate your points. You may use your books, your dictionaries, and your notes, but you are not allowed to copy any prepared material. These are sample questions for your analysis. I will probably not use the same questions on the real assignment.

We began the poetry segment of our course with the "oral tradition," video tape that showed the Irish tale-teller and the Turkish bard. We continued in this vein with selected poems of Jim Autry and Quincy Troop. Does it help to hear a poem performed, even if only read aloud by someone other than the author? Have we, as a society over stressed the printed page as the media for poems? Use examples from the tapes or class to discuss these ideas. Relate this to one or two of the poems we read in class (Frost, Yeats, Marvell, etc). What is it that makes a poem "authentic"?
Time seems a major concern in "To His Coy Mistress," "Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May," and "The Sun Rising." Talk about how they treat time: carpe diem.
Robert Frost has a real talent for presenting poems to readers that can be interpreted both literally and symbolically. "Stopping by Woods" is one. "Mending Wall" and "Out, Out" are two others that come immediately to mind. Show me how and where he does this.
"Dulce et Decorum Est" and "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" treat war entirely differently from "The Charge of the Light Brigade," written a century earlier. Explain, illustrating your reasons with lines from the poems.

Typical In-Class Poetry Assignment

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